on the Outside. EQuinox, the official EverQuest 2 magazine, includes Ctrl+Alt+Del comic strips. In 2007, Ctrl+Alt+Del partnered with 2K Games/Firaxis Games to produce a series of comics for Sid Meier's Civilization Daydreams. Reception In 2004 and 2005, Ctrl+Alt+Del was nominated for the Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards Outstanding Gaming Comic award, and in 2005 it was nominated for Outstanding Comic. By December 2005, the webcomic was attracting an audience of over 300,000 readers each day, which led to "robust" merchandising sales. Shaula Clark of The Boston Phoenix described Buckley as a polarizing figure who created a devoted fanbase for his webcomic while receiving criticism from peers such as Yahtzee and the writers of Penny Arcade. She goes on to attempt to determine why Ctrl+Alt+Del receives the amount of criticism that it has, believing that Buckley's attempt to take a webcomic originally created to showcase strips focusing on Warcraft-related jokes and "the monkey-cheese-ninja random wackiness of manchild main character Ethan" in a new direction by adding "excruciatingly slow, melodramatic, ham-handed plot arcs" helped lead to the negative feedback that the strip has received. Clark points to the "Loss" story arc, which focuses on Lilah's miscarriage, in particular as an example of this. She also regards the holiday invented by Buckley and introduced in Ctrl+Alt+Del, Winter-een-mas, as an "obnoxious gamer holiday" that runs every year from January 25 to 31. Readers of video game weblog Joystiq voted Buckley's pair of comics that he wrote for the video game Civilization IV: Beyond the Swords website as the most popular. Ross Miller of Joystiq described the two strips as ones that "played on historical anachronisms and World Wonder rule sets", while noting that he hoped that those who voted in the poll "didn't choose the strip for the Buttsylvania line". Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Levi Buchanan compared Ctrl+Alt+Del to Penny Arcade, describing both as webcomics that take advantage of the lack of censorship on the web by using expletives when they are appropriate, and if they serve the story. Buchanan also considered Ctrl+Alt+Del to be a webcomic with a smaller cast than that of Penny Arcade, noting that the former focuses primarily on the two friends Ethan and Lucas, while the latter comprises a much larger cast. The Knoxville News-Sentinel called Ctrl+Alt+Del a "healthy dose of Web-comic-meets-videogame-playing-geek", describing its drawing style as "cartoonish" and its humor as one that "hilariously lampoons all things gaming